Motorola, Microsoft Advancing Speech For Front End

<B> Motorola, Microsoft Advancing Speech For Front End</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

<I>New York</I> - Motorola and Microsoft last week announced initiatives that doubtless will advance speech recognition as a standard way for people to use computers.

At a New York press conference announcing a formal alliance of "V-Commerce" vendors, Motorola--whose interest is obviously in enabling its mobile communication devices to serve as front ends to the Internet--introduced a simplified language for writing software that uses the human voice for data input. Called VoxML, the new language closely resembles HTML, the simplified programming language of the Internet.

Meanwhile, insiders say that Microsoft has been planning a leap into the telephone business--and is about to release a voice-activated telephone to the general public.

"I don't think we've publicly announced that, but we are releasing a technology product in that area in the next couple of weeks that is using speech technology as part of the solution," said Doug Henrich, Microsoft's director of business development and intelligent interfaces.

<B>Microsoft Staffs Up</B>

Microsoft in April "decided that speech research was ready for prime time and built a technology team to help bring it out," Henrich said. It now has 50 to 100 people working in the language area--and that number has been "limited by the difficulty in finding people," he said. He expects the unit to grow "50 to 100 percent a year for the next couple of years."

Last month, Microsoft released standard programming interfaces to allow software and hardware developers to "build applications that use speech even if they don't know very much about speech," he said. "We see speech as a core enabling technology that people are going to want to use broadly in their computers and operating systems. We're all trying to make it really easy for software developers to speech-enable their applications."

More on Microsoft's plans in the speech arena are available on its Website, at microsoft.com/iit.

Motorola, too, is pushing the technology. "Our commitment is to change the interface to allow developers to access data through any wire line, to leverage their investment in tools and staff to bring applications to everybody," said Maria Martinez, vice president and general manager of Motorola's Internet and connectivity services division in Naperville, Ill. "We are interested in merging the personal network with the Internet, and we see the area of speech as critical to mobile connectivity."

In addition to adding the word "V-Commerce" to the technology lexicon, the new V-Commerce alliance will develop voice technology standards and help "extend electronic commerce to everyone who has a phone," said Ronald Croen, president and CEO of Nuance Communications, which is a member of the alliance.

Nuance's speech-recognition products are used in the travel industry by American Airlines, American Express and Via World Network, which is itself an alliance member. (See story, page 4.)

Croen said the new language allows "the average HTML developer to add a speech interface to the applications he or she is using today," and "portends the very rapid development" of electronic commerce products that allow customers to place or follow up on orders by simply speaking into a telephone.

SAP, whose systems are used by two million corporate employees at 10,000 installations, "could easily see ten times that number of users, but it's going to take interfaces that have little cost"--like telephones, said Robert Wenig, director of advanced technology at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., another alliance member.

Microsoft and IBM, another huge player in voice, are not yet members, but are certainly welcome to join, Croen said. However, both companies said they had no knowledge of the alliance.

Further announcements about "other large players" with whom the V-Commerce Alliance will be working will be announced next month, Croen said.